President's Statement on Encampment (original) (raw)

Dear City College Campus Community,

I write to you tonight with a brief update on activities that have happened on campus since we issued our remote posture email yesterday. I know that for many of you, the idea of an NYPD presence on campus is anathema. In the next several days, I will provide more details concerning what happened and why we took the decisions we did. I’ll also find a time in the near future to meet with faculty and staff in a town hall to take questions. For now, I’d like to present the facts as we know them.

For the last several days, we began to observe efforts by members of the encampment to prepare materials to breach our buildings–most strikingly, they had pried large rocks out of our campus walls and positioned them in front of the different windows of buildings fronting the quad. Students inside the encampment began to warn us that outsiders among them were planning to take over a building. Importantly, at that time, we had made no effort to dismantle the encampment or in any way restrict the protest activities of those inside the encampment.

At approximately 7pm last night, we received word that hundreds of protesters were moving towards the City College campus from the south. As they approached, a large group from the encampment moved to the front door of Shepard Hall and began trying to enter. Shortly thereafter, about 300 demonstrators arrived at the fence we had erected at 140th Street. Members of the NYPD who had traveled with those demonstrators took up positions on the outside of our fence, in support of the approximately 35 public safety officers we had serving across the campus.

As the arriving demonstrators engaged the NYPD outside our campus, a group from the encampment engaged our security officers from the inside of our perimeter, eventually managing to breach their protective line and join with members from the protest group who came to campus separately. After some scuffling, the demonstrators broke into a run heading for the administration building. Our security guards followed and prevented them from entering through the front door, but a contingent managed to enter through the back, undetected for a brief period.

Our public safety team eventually entered the building, and made a total of 31 arrests. Preliminary count is that no CCNY students were arrested as part of that group. Two public safety officers were sent to the hospital due to injuries and pepper spray related trauma. We will soon have more information and documentation of those events.

Later that evening, as more protesters moved to campus, and after NYPD broke up the encampment at Columbia, NYPD returned to our campus to prevent the additional protesters who were trying to breach the perimeter of the campus while members of the encampment here set up flares and massed near the 138th street gate.

What followed was several hours of chaos. While the NYPD chased demonstrators outside the campus, and CCNY campus security worked to contain protesters on campus. Throughout the next several hours, via bullhorn and in cooperation with some student government leaders, we conveyed the message that students wishing to avoid confrontation and possible arrest would be allowed to leave via the 135th street gate. By 11:00 p.m., to the best of our knowledge, no student remained on campus who wanted to leave. But a sizable demonstration remained, and at a time when our small and exhausted force of public safety officers needed additional support, I made the difficult call of allowing the NYPD to enter the campus and assist.

I want to be clear that since the beginning of this protest, City College never once attempted or threatened to dismantle the encampment, nor in any way infringed upon the protest activities. In fact, the letter we sent to the encampment yesterday morning, detailing all of the ways in which demonstrator activities endangered our campus community, reaffirmed the rights of demonstrators–including those in the encampment–to protest. The move to occupy our buildings was not, that is, a reaction to our efforts to displace or dismantle the encampment.

As I said, I expect to present corroboration of the various points I raised in this memo in the days to come. Some of you may still believe that, even granting the facts laid out in this memo, that our resort to external assistance was unacceptable. I will disagree.

I look forward to a full discussion of the events of these past few days in the very near future.

Sincerely,

Vince Boudreau,
President